The fourth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release includes the all-new artwork for the 2008 Spring release, further improvements to the Mandriva software management tools, WPA-EAP support in the network configuration tools, KDE 3.5.9 and available 4.0.1, some new default applications in KDE and GNOME, and the latest pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2.4. See here for download information. And URPMI got support for rpm5.

To a great extent, that's true. It took some Debian users several years to come to terms with the fact that other distros had adopted package manager. And even today, one still hears unsupported claims of something called 'RPM Hell' whatever that might be.

But... there are some practical advantages that deb based distros have compared to rpm based ones.

Package availability for deb based distros is typically sterling. Debian and Ubuntu have something like 19000 - 20000+ packages available. Compare that to Fedora, which has about 9000-10000 available. And that actually does make a difference in the real world. There have been plenty of times where a package I wanted to use was just an apt-get away on my deb based machines, but rather more difficult to locate for my rpm based ones. It used to be that certain out of repo proprietary packages came as rpm or tgz only. But the rise of Ubuntu pretty much put an end to that.

Also, apt *is* very noticeably faster. It's faster at processing the metadata, and it almost always has superior download speeds. I believe it can pull from multiple servers at once. YUM is also a bit clunky. It has more issues with database corruption, requiring an rpm --rebuilddb. I sometimes have to force kill it. And I sometimes have to fiddle with lock files.

And that clunkyness extends to pirut. Synaptic is much nicer.

On the other hand, yum is steadily getting better. And I look forward to delta RPMs actually becoming useful, in practical way, in Fedora 9. Which is nice, because I still generally prefer Fedora to deb based distros. Depending upon the situation, of course.

And for good reason. Installing packages from other distributions is not a good idea, no matter what format they're in. Frankly I think Alien is intrinsically irresponsible as it merely encourages people to do something they shouldn't: install packages from other distros. It's a *good* thing there's no automated .deb -> .rpm converter, and I hope no-one writes one.